Mexican Presidential Election...still

Banana-republicly, they refused to listen to last week’s verdict of the electoral tribunal, which announced there was no systematic fraud in Mexico’s election. With no facts, they were emotionally clinging to a belief that there really was fraud.

Why do they do this?

Part of it is that the left doesn’t see itself as just one philosophical tendency toward greater government intervention, which technically describes it. Instead, it sees itself as something else - as the embodiment of the people itself. It sees no separateness between itself and the people it claims to represent, even though they are different.

Therefore, in the mind of such self-consumed leftists as Lopez Obrador, any rejection from the people would be not a message to fine-tune their leftist program into something more palatable to voters, but an assault on their very identity. Because remember, Lopez Obrador’s a virulent representative of the left that has delusions that it not only represents the people but IS the people.

…With that kind of certitude, it never occurs to such far-leftists that maybe voters don’t like their ideas. This is one of those things they cannot internalize. Anyone who criticizes them is dismissed as a hopeless oligarch and traitor to his class, or - depending how totalitarian - in need of some kind of destruction. This is a major political character flaw.

There’s some discussion on whether or not Obrador will bring down the left with his antics, which are sure to pull sentiment away from any cause he has, and damage the Mexican political institutions. But dismissing the political process and not finally conceding, the way Gore and Kerry finally did, brings the country to the raggedy edge of leftist totalitarianism.

Besides confusing itself with the masses, the left has a second curse: the Totalitarian Temptation.What do I mean by this? There’s a dangerous philosophical continuum from democratic left to communist tyranny, a hazard other political philosophies don’t have. Democratic leftists will insist that they are just nice socialists and patriots, and some are, but they often get cold feet when it comes time to separate themselves from totalitarians. That’s why U.S. Democrat congressmen and western leftist academics rarely condemn Fidel Castro, for instance, even though he has the most odious human rights record in the entire hemisphere. They have trouble doing it because there is an ideological affinity that blinds them to what should be a strong demarcation between democracy and tyranny. This, by the way, is one reason why Michelle Bachelet of Chile is so remarkable - she grew up in a real totalitarian-left family but managed to turn that background into her own democratic-left persona, with a very clear favor for democracy. She discarded only the tyranny aspect of her background, not the things she valued about being on the left, and became a bonafide democrat of incandescent credibility. But many cannot do that - perhaps because they consider themselves “the people,” as described above.

Because the left can occupy either democratic government, or totalitarian rule, democracy under the left is vulnerable to sliding into tyranny, amid the moral confusion of imagining oneself as the people rather than the representatives of the people.

Nowhere is that better embodied than in Mexico, halfway between the third world and the first, where AMLO nearly won the election as a democratic leftist, but now in his hour of discontent is rapidly turning into a destroyer of democracy, and starting to show a totalitarian face.

Recall that Hugo Chavez was elected in a fully democratic and non-tampered with election. This kind of thing is less likely to happen here, but only because we’ve put up protections against that and our system has been solidified in place for some time now.

The left would argue that the above statements that the left is constantly in danger of dissolving into tyranny is untrue and that it’s the right that we should fear. After all, Hitler and Mussolini were right wing fascists, right?

Well, sort of. Both were on populists upswings and both were elected from a ground swelling of popular dissatisfaction. Their policies were decidedly more right, so I guess we could say that the left would have a case here. It is possible for a right wing dictator to tyrannize the populous after getting popularly elected.

However, it would be best said that the above comments are just incomplete, because he’s right about the left. In fact, despite any admission that tyranny can come from either direction on the political spectrum, I happen to agree that the left is more vulnerable in this day and age. As long as the conservatives in this country base their philosophy on liberty of the individual and the liberals base theirs on equality of status and economy, then the left has a shorter distance to travel on the road to tyranny.